From the Cuban Missile Crisis portion of Fog of War
"Lesson #2: Rationality will not save us.
I want to say, and this is very important: at the end we lucked out. It was luck that prevented nuclear war. We came that close to nuclear war at the end. Rational individuals: Kennedy was rational; Khrushchev was rational; Castro was rational. Rational individuals came that close to total destruction of their societies. And that danger exists today."
I'm all for arms reduction that maintains strategic deterrence. Everyone knows that MAD is, well, mad -- but the real question is whether it is more or less mad than the alternatives, and the leading alternative is to trust a bunch of sovereign nations to act together against their best interest, and that's even more mad than MAD.
Russia detected something rising off the coast of Norway. The performance looked like an older US SLBM. It was heading towards Russia and north--not towards anything important but a viable trajectory for an EMP decapitation attack. What it really showed is how poor their systems were.
The bird was real. It really was an older US SLBM--repurposed as a scientific launcher. It was launched from an island off the coast of Norway--but the Russian systems weren't good enough to figure that out. They also weren't good enough to figure out it was really heading mostly north, basically following the coast. And their bureaucracy had lost the launch notification, probably related to the fact that it didn't have a time on it. The bird was prepped (a good reason to use a solid rocket, it can sit there on the pad for a long time) awaiting the conditions it was meant to study.
Have we really left total war behind? Is it really, finally, to awful to contemplate? That would honestly be a huge step forward for humanity. It seems too good to trust. This isn't the terminal phase of history; 2,000 years from now this may be a blip.